The merger that Hubble spied in the Cancer constellation has been in progress for more than a century. Labeled IC 2431, it waswho used a much smaller ground telescope. Though he identified it as a quadruple merger, NASA and ESA researchers think there are three galaxies in the gaseous churn.
NGC 2444 pulls gases away from NGC 2445, “forming the oddball triangle of newly minted stars” in the Arp 143 galaxy system.a collision between two passing galaxies is leading to “a firestorm of star formation.” On February 22, NASA and the ESA posted a Hubble shot of the ancient galaxy NGC 2444 yanking at the spiral galaxy NGC 2445 during an eons-long driveby. As NGC 2444 lumbers along, its massive gravitational field is teasing out NGC 2445’s gases, creating a trail of young blue stars. The newborn stellar masses rest at the heart of the smaller galaxy, and are estimated to be one to two million years old.
But there’s a dark side to this pairing, too. The Hubble image reveals a web of black gases leaking out from the core of the star birth; its origins and components are still largely a mystery. “Radio observations reveal a powerful source in the core that may be spearheading the outbursts,” . “The radio source may have been produced by intense star formation or a black hole gobbling up material flowing into the center.”
Sounds like a metaphor.